Blog

TL;DR

Watch a real-time stream of DOIs being cited (and “un-cited!” ) in Wikipedia articles across the world: https://live.eventdata.crossref.org/live.html

Background

For years we’ve known that the Wikipedia was a major referrer of Crossref DOIs and about a year ago we confirmed that, in fact, the Wikipedia is the 8th largest refer of Crossref DOIs. We know that people follow the DOIs, too. This despite a fraction of Wikipedia citations to the scholarly literature even using DOIs. So back in August we decided to create a Wikimedia Ambassador programme. The goal of the programme was to promote the use of persistent identifiers in citation and attribution in Wikipedia articles. We would do this through outreach and through the development of better citation-related tools.

tl;dr http://chronograph.labs.crossref.org

At Crossref we mint DOIs for publications and send them out into the world, but we like to hear how they’re getting on out there. Obviously, DOIs are used heavily within the formal scholarly literature and for citations, but they’re increasingly being used outside of formal publications in places we didn’t expect. With our DOI Event Tracking / ALM pilot project we’re collecting information about how DOIs are mentioned on the open web to try and build a picture about new methods of citation.

Remember when I said that the Wikipedia was the 8th largest referrer of DOI links to published research? This despite only a fraction of eligible references in the free encyclopaedia using DOIs. We aim to fix that. Crossref and Wikimedia are launching a new initiative to better integrate scholarly literature in the world’s largest public knowledge space, Wikipedia. This work will help promote standard links to scholarly references within Wikipedia, which persist over time by ensuring consistent use of DOIs and other citation identifiers in Wikipedia references.

[ Crossref Labs loves to be the last to jump on an internet trend, so what better than than to combine the Doge meme with altmetrics? Note: The API calls below have been superceeded with the development of the Event Data project. See the latest API documentation for equivalent functionality Want to know how many times a Crossref DOI is cited by the Wikipedia? http://det.labs.crossref.org/works/doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0086859 Or how many times one has been mentioned in Europe PubMed Central?